Top ten literary feuds

Poet and novelist Michael Crummey is from Newfoundland, the setting for much of his writing. His first book of poems, Arguments with Gravity, was awarded the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. Crummey's novels include River Thieves, The Wreckage, and the award-winning Galore.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten literary feuds.

One title on the list:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Set on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, McCarthy's novel follows the fortunes of the Glanton gang, a clan of misfits and psychopaths hired to clear the west of its indigenous inhabitants. It's an unrelenting chronicle of violence and degradation that refuses to take sides or moralise. The thin line between victim and perpetrator disappears early in the story, and the Glanton gang descend into a hell of their own making. As in all blood feuds, violence begets violence until it becomes the end itself. McCarthy fashions a perversely lyrical ballet of the carnage.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel and is among Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue